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Why Hades x Persephone Isn't The Healthy Couple You Think They Are (Part 1)

TRIGGER WARNING: Mentions of child marriage, sexual assault/abuse, unhealthy/abusive relationships

Oh, holy shit! I went there!

Brace yourselves, folks! You're in for a long, bumpy ride! I'm going to have to separate this into two entries!

Looking around on and offline, it's all too easy to get the wrong impression of Hades and Persephone. With all the fanfic and merchandise (e.g. Lore Olympus, Punderworld, Hadestown, Hades, Class of the Titans, Percy Jackson, A Touch of Darkness, Kaos, Blood of Zeus ... the list is seemingly endless), you'd easily be forgiven for thinking, and I quote, they're one of the top three healthiest and most functional relationships in Ancient Greek mythology. (I actually saw a YT video on this.)

No, no. A thousand times, no.

The whole point of their relationship that people seem to be missing is that it's a toxic and abusive one, even by the standards of Ancient Greece, and I'll explain why in extensive detail below. (Source: Theoi.com and JSTOR)

Firstly, we need to dispel the baseless notion that Persephone wandered into the Underworld on her own, or that she made the choice to willingly leave with Hades, which came from an book written in the 1960s/1970s by Charlene Spretnak who claims that misogynistic men stole away Persephone's power and agency by making her a victim of Hades, because she wanted to get her daughter into Greek mythology and didn't want to tell her the truth. (Yes, because lying to your daughter about the very real historical misogyny in Ancient Greece is the feminist thing to do, amirite?!) It has led to an demonization of Demeter (who should be, by all accounts, hailed as an feminist mother in an era of oppressive patriarchy). There are literally NO versions of the myth (Homeric Hymn, Diodorus Siculus, Apollodorus, Claudian, Ovid) in which Persephone wasn't abducted, it's literally called 'The Rape/Abduction of Persephone' for a reason. There is even a famous statue of Hades violently kidnapping (a barely pubescent) Persephone in Italy!

In the Claudian version of the myth, Hades literally puts Persephone in chains: She saw Proserpine shut in the dark confines of a prison-house and bound with cruel chains.

Now, let's get into the other baseless notion (spread by YouTubers such as Overly Sarcastic Productions) ... that Hades didn't rape Persephone, he only abducted her because of a mistranslation, that rape and abduction are the same word. (Oh, please just kill me ...) That's not true, because 'rape' and 'abduction' are the same word in the LATIN language, not the GREEK language ... and they're used interchangeably because abduction always led to rape back in those days (and often these days!) You want proof that he raped her (or at least coerced her into sex)? Here it is:

"There he found the lord in his palace sitting on a bed with his bashful bedmate, very much unwilling, longing for her mother."

Regardless of the true translation, he was forcing her to share a bed with him, and why would he do that if they weren't having sex? In Claudian's version, Persephone was literally screaming about how she was inevitably going to lose her virginity to Hades as she was being taken by him: "Happy girls whom other ravishers have stolen; they at least enjoy the general light of day, while I, together with my virginity, lose the air of heaven; stolen from me alike is innocence and daylight."

People online bring up Overly Sarcastic Productions' video on Hades and Persephone as a rebuttal, and yet on OSP's website, she brings up the 'unwilling bedmate'. (OSP isn't a valid source of information  -  she admits that she deeply sanitizes these myths for her YT videos.)

I see people online defending Hades by saying that it's more of a forced marriage than a child abduction, which is true ... and they're also completely missing the entire point of the myth, which is why it's WRONG! It's true that in Ancient Greece (and elsewhere!), a man only needed to obtain the father's permission to marry his daughter, it didn't matter if her mother or the daughter herself disagreed. Even so, fathers in Ancient Greece (even Athens!) would at least inform their daughters of it, especially if the marriage was to another relative, hence why the Homeric Hymn goes out of its way to condemn Zeus for it. Yet, in the Claudian version of the myth, Hades threatens Zeus with releasing the Titans from Tartarus if Zeus did not comply with his demands for a wife and family. Ovid has Hades shot with an love arrow from Eros because Aphrodite did not want one more virgin goddess.

That's not even getting into how Persephone isn't just a young woman, she's implicitly an actual CHILD in these myths. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which is the earliest source of the myth, calls her 'Kore' (girl). Ovid's retelling of the myth in his Metamorphoses has this line:

Here Proserpina [Persephone] was playing in a glade and picking flowers, pansies and lilies, with a child's delight, filling her basket and her lap to gather more than the other girls, when, in a trice, Dis [Haides] saw her, loved her, carried her away--love leapt in such a hurry! Terrified, in tears, the goddess called her mother, called her comrades too, but oftenest her mother; and, as she'd torn the shoulder of her dress, the folds slipped down and out the flowers fell, and she, in innocent simplicity, grieved in her girlish heart for their loss too.

In Ancient Greece (with the exception of Sparta), the average age of marriage for girls was 12-14 to grown men twice their age, and if you were of the upper-class, then you would be married off to your half-uncle. Greece hasn't been pagan for centuries now, and yet girls as young as 14 were still being married off to old men for financial reasons in the rural countryside until 1970. Child marriage is still widespread globally to this day (the United States leads the Western world in child brides because of the Mormons and the Amish, with only 12 banning it by 2024, and two-thirds of teen pregnancies are conceived via statutory rape by men in their twenties).

Ancient Greece was a society in which young women and little girls alike would vanish off the face of the earth, and their mothers would never come to know of them again, either because they were dead and/or holed up in the basement of a rapist's house. This is because Ancient Greece was a society in which they regularly and routinely exposed baby girls to die, which created an severe gender imbalance in many city-states (mainly Athens), leading many men to resort to what we would consider in the modern era to be human trafficking (abduction and rape) of women and girls from city-states such as Sparta, Crete, Mycenae, etc. (The myth of Theseus and Ariadne also reflects this.) Mothers in Ancient Greece would pray to Demeter to bring their daughters back alive. The EXACT SAME literally goes on today, in countries like China, Vietnam, Thailand, Armenia, India (which was once invaded by the Greeks under Alexander the Great and adopted many of their cultural practices).

The grief and pain felt by Demeter and Persephone is still felt by mothers and daughters over the world. That's part of the reason why the incessant romanticization of this myth has a damaging side to this, it is not something we have left behind, and women still continue to fight against it. When we have a collective perception that this isn't a practice anymore, it's easier for it to continue, hidden in plain sight, while we dismiss mothers and loved ones for being "dramatic" and "ruining" a "love story", it becomes easier to turn a blind eye to the Demeters and the Persephones all around of us.

To be continued ... in Part 2

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Why Hera Isn't The Jealous Wife You Think She is ...

Yes, you read that right.

One of the biggest misconceptions about Hera in modern popular culture is that she's waiting in the dark, ready to strike out at Zeus' next extramarital affair and bastard child, but, eh ... that paints an largely inaccurate depiction of what's ACTUALLY going on.

Firstly, Zeus has somewhere between 92 to 100 children (I'm not kidding when I say there's literally a entire book written about this subject) whereas you can literally count all of the women and children Hera had a problem with, on both hands.

Aegina (mother of Aeacus)

Leto (mother of Artemis and Apollo)

Io (mother of Epaphus)

Elara (mother of Tityos)

Callisto (mother of Arcas)

Semele (mother of Dionysus)

Alcmene (mother of Herakles)

Lamia (mother of Akheilos)

Persephone (mother of Zagreus)

Aphrodite (mother of Priapus)

Yup, that's literally ALL OF THE TIMES Hera has gone 'woman scorned'. Two of the aforementioned examples are not even 'canon' (Persephone and Aphrodite), and while it may still seem like a lot by itself, doing the math you realize that it's only 7-10% since it's ZEUS we're talking about. Sometimes she'll entirely leave the moms alone and exclusively go after the kids, sometimes she'll mostly go after the mom and otherwise leave the kids alone, sometimes she'll go after both ... Not saying that what Hera does isn't disproportionate, especially if they were victims of SA, but with Io, it was little more than harmless trolling and she usually gets over it eventually (Leto is the only one she's still salty about).

(Also does anyone else notice that she never went after Zeus' daughters? It's not a coincidence when that Dionysus was raised as a girl to protect him from Hera's wrath!)

Why are these ones the only ones she got upset about? Well, it's not because they were loved by Zeus (only Leto, Semele, and Alcmene), or that their kids were dearer to him than Hera's (only Leto, Semele, and Alcmene). Hell, in The Iliad, when Zeus listed off his greatest loves to Hera, he only mentioned Leto, Semele, and Alcmene. Rather, it's the catharsis factor. See, Hera is the long-suffering-in-silence wife, who willingly turns a blind eye to Zeus' 'sex-capades', because that's what she knowingly signed up for, until her resentment builds up overtime and indiscriminately explodes onto whomever is his current flavour of the week. Sure, there may be other contributing factors at play as to why she targets these specific women (e.g. Semele is a priestess and Hera's great-granddaughter through Ares, Io is her priestess, etc.), but all in all, Hera is the woman wearing the queenly mask and heavy is the head who wears the crown.

Why did I say that Hera knew what she signed up for? Zeus is the King of Gods (so King of Kings), and real life kings in Ancient Greece (and elsewhere!) were polygamists - one queen consort and as many concubines as he desired. The Queen Consort's role is to manage the harem and her sons are automatically considered next in line to the throne. Hera is listed as Zeus' third wife (Metis as his first and Themis as his second) and the only one who is ever acknowledged as Queen (because his previous marriages occurred BEFORE he ascended to the throne post-Titanomachy - Rhea was Queen Dowager after they overthrew Cronus), but he also has Eurynome, Demeter, Mnemosyne, Leto, Maia, and co. as his concubines. Notice how with the sole exception of Leto, Hera never got mad about the goddesses Zeus knocked up. That's because if they bear Zeus a child, they're automatically the newest addition to his harem. Leto is the sole goddess to ever bear the brunt of Hera's wrath, because she's that favourite concubine who poses a potential threat to Hera (if you catch my drift).

(If you want a better understanding of harem politics, then watch any Chinese palace drama.)

I'd also like to mention that in Ancient Greece, it was legal to murder your husband's mistresses, and so what Hera did wasn't wrong or illegal in the eyes of Ancient Greeks. It was, in fact, probably cathartic since women had to live in the fear of being cast out onto the streets if their husband decided to divorce them for another wife. Moreover, Hera, as the Queen consort, had the authority to cast any disciplinary action on any women and children of the harem as she saw fit. In the eyes of the law, children of the concubine were always servants to children of the wife. That's what Jason was trying to do to Medea by the way, and why she reacted in the way she did (killing the other woman and even her own children).

Zeus and Hera, as hard as it may be for some to believe, is/were THE OTP of the Hellenistic religion, even if the myths depict them as an marriage of convenience at best (because the Ancient Greeks liked to project their own sociocultural norms onto their mythology). Still, I can personally understand that. In ancient China, the Emperor was the dragon and father of the nation, the Empress was the phoenix and mother of the nation. There was even a saying that the Emperor and Empress were two bodies with one mind. Even if people knew the truth about royal marriages behind closed doors, they were still revered as the Perfect Couple in the public sphere.

Source: Theoi.com (your go-to source for authentic Greek mythology!)

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I know this joke is old but ...

Zeus: "I love all my children equally, Athena, Artemis, Apollo, Hermes, Dionysus ... wait, is Aphrodite my kid or not?" *looks at smudged writing on each hand* "Arse, Hepatitis ... who names these kids?"